Ha ha!

You certainly never know what movie he'll review next!

Friday, 30 August 2013

Burl reviews Dredd! (2012)

Ha ha pals, it’s Judge Burl, here to render judgment on the
second attempt to dramatize the Judge Dredd funnybook stories for cinema
screens! The first try, Judge Dredd,
came in 1995, with good old Sly “Cobra” Stallone judiciously grimacing his way through the role! This one, Dredd, features a different actor
scowling like Waldorf from beneath the headgear, though, ha ha, it hardly
matters!

The 1995 version of the story was one of those
candy-coloured sci-fi action pictures that take place in especially
fake-looking, studio-bound environments! That’s a venerable Hollywood tradition
dating back to Logan’s Run; other
examples include Total Recall, Demolition Man and the Batman pictures from the 80s and 90s!
The action is never very exciting in these movies for some reason, perhaps
because it all seems terribly hemmed in by the studio environments and the
shiny fakery which there abounds! That’s not to say these movies can’t be
occasionally enjoyable, but they just aren’t pulse-racers, ha ha!

This Dredd tries
hard to be grittier and nastier and more inventively gruesome than its forbear,
and while it succeeds in this, it still isn’t very exciting! It’s one of those
video game-inspired plots in which everyone is trapped inside a grotty
high-rise and the heroes must fight their way from floor to floor until they
get to the big boss for the final confrontation! Ha ha, just like Enemy Territory and The Raid! (The Raid, for
the record, has more action-excitement in any one of its setpieces than Dredd manages in its whole 95 minutes!

Our hero is of course Judge Dredd (keeping his helmet on the
whole time, unlike Stallone, ha ha!) and his sidekick is a lady psychic, who is
a big step up from the puny wiseacre who was Stallone’s compadre! They must
battle Ma-Ma, a scarfaced harridan who has made this particular mega-block
her own private property! She rules it with an iron thumb, and her business is
dispensing a d*ug which makes everything happen in slow motion! There’s lots of
scenes from the point of view of the people trip*ing on this dr*g, and to tell
you the truth, they could have had a bit less of it, even though it looks sort
of neat!

I’ll tell you this, ha ha: Dredd is a pretty violent picture, but though the violence, the
grim atmosphere and the off-putting neo-fascism of its concept would seem to
demand some leavening, or at least a wink or two somewhere, we never get it!
Everything in the picture leads up to Ma-Ma’s final punishment, which is extended
into a multi-minute sequence thanks to the slo-mo dru*, and therein, I suppose,
lies its entire raison d’etre! It’s
not much to hang a big expensive movie on, really; but at least the trick
effects are nice! Ha ha!

I
won’t say I enjoyed Dredd very much,
because I didn’t! I guess I wanted to see the villains get theirs as much as
anyone, and that’s why I kept watching, but it really is a movie where the end
credits start and you say “Huh!” in an affectless sort of way! I’m going to
award Dredd one single big tall
apartment building!